ZX Spectrum Next Issue 2 blasts through Kickstarter goal | Hacker News Reader

ZX Spectrum Next Issue 2 blasts through Kickstarter goal

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77 pointsAlexeyBrin52 comments

I'm totally on board for this kind of stuff. Well, not this one in particular (I never had a Speccy back in the day), but I did buy RetroGames' TheC64 maxi and I love it -- that's the one with the full size keyboard. There's room for improvement [1], and yes, it does nothing you couldn't do with an emulator, but still... it looks like the real thing I remember from my childhood, with none of the downsides of plugging an old home computer to modern LCDs and USB pendrives.

[1] the consensus seems to be the major thing it's lacking is a soft reset, necessary for some tricks and dev environments on the C64. It's weird it doesn't have it, because VICE has it. I figure they just have to enable some key combination or add it to the menu in a firmware update.

Been waiting for this to hit the US. During lock down I was playing with VICE / C64 emu, and I know I could do some work with keymaps, but gosh, the keyboard was the single largest pain I ran into!

Speaking of soft reset, I saw someone who did a C64 restoration, it was probably a Youtuber, and they made their power switch have a tap to reset mode, pretty neat feature.

Having real interaction with these retro devices is an interesting point of desire - I feel it very much myself, and it makes such a huge difference. I assume it has something to do with the latency that emulators add to the experience, and especially if you used it in the past, these are real frustrations.

Just imagining a similar hypothetical, if I played a game that made a "fake" modem protocol negotiation noise, it would drive me crazy :)

> I know I could do some work with keymaps, but gosh, the keyboard was the single largest pain I ran into!

That's pretty much why I got the maxi. I really wanted a keyboard that felt like the real one.

Re: the latency of emulators. You're totally right. But look at the downsides of a real C64: there are lots of pain points you likely don't remember when looking through rose tinted glasses. I don't miss the long load times, or fidgeting with the datasette -- and googling, I find that the disk drive was bugged and was too slow even for yesterday's standards -- and I certainly don't want to deal with video output converters. Plus the whole faulty/unreliable PSUs. The maxi is way more convenient.

The maxi does some things right (low latency, though not zero; looks like the real thing) and some wrong (weird and unwanted games carrousel; I cannot flash it with my favorite emu -- that'd be BMC64; lack of soft reset). I can live with it as it is!

But agreed, the real hardware and peripherals have a powerful emotional attraction. I've certainly had to fight with the urge to buy old crap for nostalgia's sake, like for example an old PC XT with a monochrome CRT ("where are you going to put it? what are you going to do with it?").

PC XT was my first computer, and when I think of owning one, I immediately go to how loud and slow the 5 1/4 floppies were.

I'm sure I'd just roll my eyes as I hear the disk lock in place and start burping mechanically.

This is one of the huge benefits of the FPGA setup, you can make a first pass on real hardware if you want, but once the data is read in, you can keep it side loaded in an SD card and never deal with the slow peripheral again. Taking a modern IO device back in time is really kind of awesome.

I began my first year of my career in technical writing using the Commodore 64 and its slow disk Drive. Never caused me a problem, although the word processor program itself, called SpeedScript, was only about 3K in size.

It didn't cause me problems as a kid either. I didn't know better.

I find with vintage hardware there are two kinds of constraints: low memory and screen res are exciting, they make you think of how to achieve things with few resources. But slow, unreliable disk drives are the unexciting stuff; I don't want to deal with those ever again now that I know better. I don't want to fuss about datasette calibration and find I got it wrong after a game fails to load, either.

£300?

That is some serious cash for a bit of nostalgia.

No, it's a steal. :) The 16kB ZX Spectrum cost £125 at launch in 1982, which according to the Bank of England was equivalent to £444 in 2019.

I remember my brother saved up to buy a ZX81. He didn't want out parents to know he'd taken ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS that was supposed to go into his college fund and spent it on a computer so he would hide it in a manilla envelope on the bookshelf when he wasn't using it.

This is a super modern machine underneath, well, maybe not super. But it has WiFi, an SD card reader, and you can do quite a bit more than just run it as a number of different spectrum models in hardware.

I see it as a souped up "all-in-one" like a Raspberry Pi w/ a case and accessories.

It's still quite a bit more, but I think that's to be expected given it's less than massively widespread appeal.

Well, I mean, it has 1Mb of RAM.

Hold on a second there, they hit their stretch goals so it has two MEGAbytes of ram, that's MEGA! whoa :)

If I understood the whole story correctly, the people who ordered the first version waited for 3 years(!) and anybody who heard about that first version and wanted it but haven't ordered at the start, wasn't able order later.

Not long ago, the first version finally shipped, after some started to doubt it will ever happen. Now everybody expects that the second version is much more "sure."

Also note that this is not an emulator, it's a real reimplementation of the old hardware which is, as far as I understood, hardware compatible with the old devices, but also extended to allow modern interfaces and convenience expected today. All that is less simple to implement than one would think. The v2 has also new more "modern" programmable functionality, which allows for some new "demo scene" goals.

There is a whole generation of people who had the first inspiration from that machine for what became their career.

Seeing how many people already ordered, it looks that the price is "right."

It’s fairly cheap compared to some of the vintage systems I’ve seen. Acorn stuff here in the UK goes for a fair bit of cash at the moment. This is depressing as I actually turned down a whole 600kg skip load of it once.

The real vintage hardware has lots of problems and hassles, too. It's often complex to plug it to a modern monitor, it has no USB ports, it requires additional and expensive gadgets (drive emulators, video converters, replacement PSUs -- the consensus on the C64 subreddit is that you should never use the original C64 PSU). You end up buying so much stuff you might as well go with one of these retro-remakes or an emulator.

I agree. For me it'd be out of reach.

However, for Speccy hardcore fans it's probably right. A well-designed ZX Spectrum retrocompatible computer, with modern connectors, and without any of the hassle of a real Speccy. It's not a gaming platform either; I assume most owners will want to write games and software with it.

This is a luxury & niche item, and for that £300 is probably right.

The retro winds are blowing hard these days. Lockdown is helping too.

Yes, I’ve noticed this too! I think the generation growing up with these systems have grown up into the forties and long for seeing them come alive again. A generational thing. MiSTer, FPGAArcade, Vampire accelerators and even AmigaOS 3.1.4, the whole retro RPi movements with RetroPie etc, and now this too! It’s happening on so many fronts. FPGA’s (like used in this project too) have surely affected this movement as well.

I don't know if it's generational, maybe it is. But try as I could I can't buy a modern computer today that matches what Spectrums could do: 1) switch on machine 2) wait half a second 3) start typing BASIC code. Maybe if the PICO-8 guy would turn that into a hardware product. :-)

Further it's possible to completely know the machine and its software layers, and reaching down to assembler is accessible from a pretty young age.

I know exactly what you mean. The Colour Maximite 2 [1] is the closest I've found to the concept in modern hardware. An ARM Cortex M7 at 400 MHz so two orders of magnitude faster than 8 bit. I don't own one yet but very tempted!

[1] https://geoffg.net/maximite.html

Have you seen the project championed by the 8BitGuy? I think it's called Commander X16 or something like that.

Oldschool, C64 compatible, and designed for the days one programmer could understand everything about his/her computer.

Thanks - looks very interesting.

Many Arm SBCs that support linux boot very quickly[1]; if you set "init" to be a python interpreter, you'd be pretty close to that.

1: I mean they handoff to linux quickly; actually running a full set of init for linux can be painfully slow, but if you just want a REPL then that should be fast.

I kinda like that PICO-8 is software only. I get anxious about not owning the hardware otherwise (and no, I cannot buy everything that strikes my fancy). This makes all software-only PICO'ers first class citizens.

Yes! The Pyra will start shipping finally in September! I think it's been 6 years in the making?

https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/its-software-this-t...

Very much so. The ZX Spectrum is how I started programming, like so many who grew up in the UK:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html

Hacking games for infinite lives lead me to Z80 assembly, which lead me to Intel assembly, which lead to a job, and here I am, 30 years later still working with computers.

> has raised nearly £900,000

That's published yesterday, today as I write this it's:

£1,146,085

27 days to go

Yeah, there's a pretty decent sized community that's been waiting for this, they've been rallying in Facebook Groups - they hit their goal in five minutes, and have continued to have a decent trickle since then. I wonder if they'll hit 2m before the end of the Kickstarter given all the news.

Edit: wow, it's been an hour and it's crossed 1.3m, news / visibility works like heck.

Or maybe a bit less, it seems Kickstarter changes / fixes the conversions from GBP? Whatever, at the moment it shows me

£1,046,099 2,993 backers 26 days to go.

Let's see what happens in the next three weeks.

One question about the Next. How flexible is the hardware in being able to support emulation of other machines? Would it be possible to reprogram the FPGA to emulate say a C64?

Really? Get a C64 clone instead then.

The whole point is the renewed Speccy experience in a QL like packaging.

Not too surprising to find Hacker News users asking how they can hack their hardware :)

Yeah, but then get one designed for hacking C64 code on. :)

There are 'roms' that can be loaded that will reconfigure the FPGA. The first release has that already.

Thanks that's very helpful - I spotted BBC Master on one of the pages so will do some more research.

See the Mister FPGA project for what's possible. It supports a huge number of retro PCs, game consoles, arcade games, etc. https://www.retrorgb.com/mister.html

However, this effort seems very wrapped in the Spectrum culture. I don't see any indication they want to deviate from that.

If you want a project for that, check out the Turbo Chameleon 64 - that piece of hardware can also emulate a lot of other systems.

https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php?title=Turbo_Chameleon_64

It should be possible, there are other cores available:

https://gitlab.com/victor.trucco/zx-spectrum-next-cores/-/tr...

Thanks - that's a great link. Noticed some 6502 based machines on the list.

> FPGA

Eww. I wish they stuck to using a real Z80 chip. (Otherwise they might as well just have emulated everything using an ARM SBC. With a gigabyte of RAM to boot. For 20 bucks.)

The Z80 implementation in the ZX Next has a couple of useful extended instructions not found in the original Z80, and some of the instructions are tailored to the ZX Next hardware (e.g. to efficiently compute video memory addresses). So at least there's a justification for not using real Z80 chips...

My understanding is that they needed to to do this because one of the main chips, the video chip, is no longer available, and since they were using FPGA for that, I assume at that point the cost is driven down by just implementing Z80 in there too, with little loss of quality.

That 20 bucks turns into about 100 added to retail with normal manufacturing price models. Source: Have consulted with several factories, and in several as well.

I'd wish for a CPC Next.

That’s my wish too. Unfortunately it’s very rare to find such a great team with a great vision for these projects.

Looks like you can update the FPGA to have CPC firmware?

https://gitlab.com/victor.trucco/zx-spectrum-next-cores/-/tr...

I can run an emulator, I would wish for something that looks and feels like CPC.

Totally get it - though I think the upside of the FPGA, is that it works like real hardware (in theory) so has some advantages to emulators, especially if you want to use real hardware / accessories.

I know some emulators do a good job at this too, but it can often be quite constrained (like VICE's emulation of specific carts)

It wouldn't have the same vibe without a complete redesign specifically for CPC. Especially the keyboard.

The plastic exterior seems like the easy part for a hobbyist, but I take your point.

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129182

I got back into the Retro computing scene over the last couple of months, it's very active. The price isn't bad (especially when you look at the prices of original ZX Spectrum 128K, some Amigas, etc.), and you can find original 48k versions on eBay for <$100.

If you don't want to shell out for a Next (and you don't want to wait a year for one), pickup one from eBay, get a new switch mode PSU like a Triad [1]. While you're getting a new PSU, order the replacement capacitors as the originals don't age well [2]. Modify the RF output to composite [3], or get a VGA [4] or HDMI video interface [5] (the VGA and HDMI quality is amazing, but probably because I had a 13" black and white Ferguson TV back in the day). Finally, most of the units I picked up have broken keyboard membranes so you'll need one of those too [6]. Cases, rubber keyboards and keyboard covers are all available, you can make even the most well-used speccy look like new - and good to go for another 40 years.

There are loads of great resources out there, one of my favorites is the Tynemouth Software blog [7] - loads of great mods for old machines. It'll lead you down a rat-hole, and before you know it you'll be making music demos on a ZX81 [8] and spending money on SellMyRetro [9]!

[1] - https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/553-WSU090-2000-R [2] - https://www.mouser.com/ProjectManager/ProjectDetail.aspx?Acc... [3] - https://spectrumforeveryone.com/technical/composite-mod-for-... or https://www.tindie.com/products/projectspeccy/zx-spectrum-fl... [4] - https://www.sintech-shop.de/en/zx-vga-joy-interface-for-zx-s... [5] - https://www.bytedelight.com/?page_id=1800 [6] - https://zxrenew.co.uk/ZX-Spectrum-16k-48k-keyboard-membrane-... [7] - http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk [8] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eabTH9F2RVM [9] - https://www.sellmyretro.com

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